American Electric Power has awarded Orsus a contract for its Situator product suite. The project includes integrating thousands of security devices, located in 200 remote sites, into a unified platform.
Situator is a security and safety Situation Management software for integrated control rooms. It creates an environment where all current and future technologies, people and actionable procedures are fused into a unified control and management platform. Situator leverages existing security investments and empowers security personnel to focus on exception management. Situator helps transform routine and emergency plans into actionable, adaptive tasks and procedures and integrate them with virtually any security and safety devices, management systems, dynamic data sources and communication systems.
The AEP project marks the largest deployment of Situator for Orsus in North America. AEP is one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, with more than 5 million customers and operations that span 11 states and 200 different facilities, including power generators, transmission sites and offices. By the end of 2007, AEP anticipates that more than 25 of its facilities will be connected through the Situator platform from Orsus.
Situator's open architecture will enable AEP to unify numerous, disparate security systems, such as access control, video analytics, and intrusion detection systems, under a unified platform.
The systems integrator for this project is Adesta, LLC., of Omaha, Nebraska.
With Situator, AEP can integrate incident reporting, simulate security related events for training purposes and deploy system analysis tools to provide a comprehensive security approach. It enables the power company to also improve risk management, minimize vulnerability and comply with security regulations governing energy producing facilities.
Situator reduces potentially costly human error, makes it easy to establish and maintain compliance with industry and government regulations and improves the speed and effectiveness of incident response and recovery while actually reducing operating costs.